Yard Work is pleased to present this baseball-related excerpt from “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” the new novel by Gabriel Garci­a Marquez, which will be published later this fall. The translation is by Edith Grossman.

It occurred to me, watching that lithe adolescent pick that tamarindo up off the floor of the jungle clearing in which I lay, last night’s opium oozing out of my pores like a spirit winging its way to God, examine it closely, pretzel-twist himself into an impossible knot, then unravel that knot limb by limb as his front foot shot out in front of him and his shirtless right arm slice through the muggy Macondan air, a veritable machete, propelling that strange fruit like a button shot out of a flower, faster than the eye could follow, faster than possibility or chance or fate could demand, across the clearing to the makeshift target of three chalked circles, where it vaporized on contact, its seeds dispersing to the eight winds, that this boy, who could not be more than 13 or 15, was the greatest pitcher I had ever seen in my life.

–Hello, I called to him, –that was some pitch!

He cocked his head at an angle. –What is a pitch?

I explained to him about a game called baseball, which was then catching on all over Macondo like a brushfire. I told him it was a beautiful game, full of spirit and sadness and fury; a sexy game, where small moves and tiny nudges and adjustments had huge climactic payoffs; a maddening game that had sent grown men into tailspins, into drink-fueled spirals of depression; a game of patience and calm reflection, Zen-like in its introspection; a game that was not a game but real life played out by athletes in knickers and funny hats; a game that was all games wrapped into one, like sweet and bitter tobacco is rolled into leaves on the thighs of nubile schoolgirls before being stuffed brutally into the maws of capitalist overlords who then set them afire before ordering the executions of striking workers, a river of blood flowing through the fields, seeping down through the spongy clay to fertilize the fruit that is then picked by scab workers and sold in the world’s marketplaces but always retains the bitter taste that even the sweetest wine cannot wash out of the mouth. That kind of game.

–Hey, viejo, old man, that doesn’t sound like a good game to me, the boy snickered as he turned away from me. –That sounds like a game for assholes!

And with that, he took his measured innocent steps of a peasant back across the clearing, his bare feet punctuating our thoughts with tiny slaps like the slaps of an old john on the asses of whores, which reminded me of my melancholy whores, all 514 of them. When he reached the other side, he picked up another tamarind, executed his perfect windup, and threw a heartbreaking knuckle-slurve-eephus, which rose high up in the muggy air of a bastard, then broke four feet to the left without rotating once and dropped like a falcon right into the heart of the tree-target.

–You can take your game and shove it up your butt, viejo! I like my game better!

I turned away. I agreed with him. But his game was never going to get him paid.

Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. His novels include “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “The Manager Never Talks to Me Anymore.” He lives in Colombia and Mexico.